Screen Definitions for a legacy monitor

Well it is remarkably easy to test.

Turn computer on
Immediately hold down shift to get the grub menu.
Hit the ‘e’ key to edit the entry
Scroll down to the long line starting with the word ‘linux’ and ending in “quiet splash $vt_handoff”
That line is the kernel command line and you can add stuff to the end of it (separated by a space).
Once you’ve added your stuff, ctrl-x to continue the boot!

It it works then you can edit files…

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Yes please Wolfman. I think the problem was probably the eeePC looking for VGA but being wired for DVI, and the converter was too simple. So the protocol was being mangled some how. Probably too much to expect UMate to handle it when I should have doing right thing really. Anyway now using eBay to debug it!!! Cheers and thanks, Rob

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For any future people with this problem, the best documentation that I know of is https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/fb/modedb.txt although it’s not exactly newbie friendly. My understanding is that if you are using the open source KMS drivers (e.g. intel, nouveau, radeon) then you can set the video mode on the kernel command line.

Graphics stuff is just very confusing and in the past I have (regrettably now) thrown a computer away because I didn’t have the patience/info to figure it out. Hence, my interest in improving things!

A DVI-I connector (analog and digital on the same connector) just complicates things further, but any VGA adapter should be fairly simple and standard (cough). How it is wired in the computer though…?

It might just be a case of needing to enable VGA, which would be video=VGA-1:e

To list available connectors, at a terminal use

ls /sys/class/drm/

and if you want to be really fancy (from https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/kernel_mode_setting)

for p in /sys/class/drm//status; do con=${p%/status}; echo -n "${con#/card?-}: "; cat $p; done

Since you are connected into a DVI-I connector, you probably should be using something like

video=DVI-I-1:1280x1024M@60e

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Just one final thing… (This is one of those maddening things that can send you insane) It’s easy to get caught out by the Monitor Preferences utility. If you’ve played about with resolutions in that, then it saves a hidden file ~/.config/monitors.xml with your chosen resolution.

This is parsed by something when you log in to the desktop and will override any settings you’ve made in a xorg.conf or on the kernel command line.

Aaarrrrgggg!!! Again, another undocumented feature!

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